Review/Theater; Blown Fuse and Odd Britons Equal a Very Crowded Room

By BEN BRANTLEY

Published: September 2, 1993

Very occasionally, a single gimmick is enough to make a play's reputation, and Peter Shaffer certainly hit on one when, nearly 30 years ago, he conceived the idea for "Black Comedy." The one-act play -- which is paired with another short Shaffer piece, "White Liars," in a revival by the Roundabout Theater Company -- ingeniously sets a social farce in the darkness of a London apartment after a fuse has blown. The darkness, of course, exists only for the people onstage, since everything that happens after the electricity has gone, in the world of the play, is performed in a blaze of stage lights amid John Lee Beatty's vibrant Pop/Op setting.

Since its New York debut in 1967, with a cast that included Michael Crawford, Lynn Redgrave and Geraldine Page, "Black Comedy" has had a healthy life in American community and university theaters, and one can see why. It is, for its first half-hour, almost foolproof comically. It not only offers a novel occasion for the eternal gymnastics of elemental farce: people falling down stairs, bumping into doors and furniture and mistakenly groping each other. It also, in showing twittish characters trying to maintain their customary social rituals in a world deprived of visual cues, coaxes the latent absurdity out of those rituals, and even the process of mixing a cocktail courts burlesque disaster. As the evening progresses, though, it requires considerable finesse to disguise the fact that there is something sour at its center.

At the Roundabout, the laughter still mounts steadily as the play's caddish hero, an opportunistic young sculptor named Brindsley Miller (Peter MacNicol), tries to salvage one of the most important evenings of his life: the night in which he is to meet both the militaristic father of his debutante fiancee and a millionaire arts patron who could make his career. For reasons not worth explaining, Miller must shift the furniture in his apartment to his next-door neighbor's. And even though Mr. MacNicol portrays awkwardness awkwardly (and forgivably, since he evidently injured himself early in the performance I saw), the process -- which involves much writhing on the ground and battles with rebellious telephone wires, handbags and rocking chairs -- seems to act like nitrous oxide on many of the people watching it.

For much of the play's first half, the audience's laughter rides right over the dialogue being spoken onstage, which is, as a matter of fact, exactly what Mr. Shaffer, according to notes in his own script, intended. However, once the initial wave of chuckles subsides and we start to listen to what is being said, we realize that Mr. Shaffer has created a set of characters whom we don't necessarily enjoy spending time with.

The play is, rather tediously, built around farcical archetypes perfumed with a quintessentially 60's scent of sexual license, and one's enjoyment of it depends directly on one's tolerance for such bits as a flamboyant gay antiques dealer misreading Brindsley's whispered suggestion to his girl friend as a personal invitation, or an inhibited spinster's being mistakenly felt up and realizing she enjoys it.

This all may have seemed seductively risque in the mid-60's, but such scenes have long since become standard fare in British sex comedies with smirky titles and American sitcoms like "Three's Company." They require more than archness or slapstick to make them seem fresh again, and the director, Gerald Gutierrez, can never manage that metamorphosis nor disguise the essential distaste Mr. Shaffer seems to feel for his characters.

Most of the largely talented cast have been seen to better advantage elsewhere. Mr. MacNicol plays Brindsley with much open-mouthed grimacing, and, attired and coiffed like a nebbishy Herman's Hermit, he is never convincing, as it is essential he be, as a sexual magnet for three of the play's characters. As the antique-obsessed neighbor, the gifted Brian Murray is doing what seems to be an acrid, gay version of Jack Benny.

The evening's chief pleasures come from the redoubtable Nancy Marchand and a young actress named Anne Bobby, who charmingly convey the effect that living in darkness might have on two diametrically different personalities. Even embodying that moldiest of comic conventions -- the teetotaler who gets happily drunk -- Ms. Marchand is delightful as the introverted spinster who drags her strange interior world to the surface in an environment where no one can see her. Her delirious, drunken shuffle, which she performs as if moving to a slow jazz score in her head, and her loopy meditation on the softness of the skin of millionaires are absurdist exercises in self-imploding reticence.

Clad in a silly pink minidress that looks like a lampshade and with her bow of a mouth set in a pout of frustration, Ms. Bobby is the opposite: a gregarious, narcissistic, upper-crust girl who can't understand why her rigorously affected mannerisms aren't working. Watching her blowing a kiss in the wrong direction or clinking a ring on her finger against a cocktail tumbler to command attention, one can't help melting a little, even if we aren't meant to. She and Ms. Marchand nearly succeed in giving a heart to this mechanical farce, and they both deserve medals.

"Black Comedy" has always been saddled with another one-act play, "White Liars." Mr. Shaffer has extensively rewritten it since it was first performed here as "White Lies," but it remains a predictable play of deliberately drab lyricism about the ways in which people delude themselves. Ms. Marchand appears as an embittered down-and-out fortuneteller in a decaying seaside resort, and Mr. MacNicol and David Aaron Baker are the mysteriously linked young men who consult her.

The three actors in "White Liars" seem to have difficulty forging any vital engagement with the material, and they have been directed to deliver their big revelatory monologues baldly to the audience. Now, Mr. Gutierrez may be trying to say something quite literal about people not meeting each other's eyes, but the effect is to make an already static play seem petrified. One finds oneself uncomfortably measuring the dead air in the beats between lines and contemplating how the handsome Ms. Marchand, in a fuzzy wig and makeup of rouged cheeks and a beauty mark, has been transformed into an image of Louis XIV on a humid day.